Black and grey realism tattoo of an anatomical heart on the neck, with a steer skull, feathers and roses across the chest and shoulders.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anatomical heart, steer skull and roses on chest

Realism · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A large chest and neck piece shows an anatomical heart above a steer skull, with two feathered ornaments hanging either side and a rose on each shoulder. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft greys and strong highlights giving the skull, petals and heart a three-dimensional look. The design fills the upper torso, with the skull centred on the chest above a black lace bra, and the faint red tones in the heart are the only colour.

Realism Neck Chest Shoulder Heart Skull Rose Feather Dreamcatcher

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steer had been dead two summers when Ada finally took it down off the corral gate. Its horns had gone grey as old rope, and the sun had bleached the bone to the colour of candle wax, so that from the porch it looked less like something that had died than something set there on purpose to be looked at. Her father had nailed it up the week he bought the place. He said a man should always be able to see what the land cost him.

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The letter came on a Tuesday, the same week the wind swung north and rolled dust across the yard in long brown sheets. Her brother Sam was not coming back from the railhead at Mercy Flat. The foreman's note said only that he had been buried decently, and that a Mrs Cole from the reservation store had sent a dreamcatcher bound in red wool for the boy's grave. Ada read it twice standing at the kitchen table, then folded it into the lid of the sugar tin where she kept things she did not yet know what to do with.

She carried the skull out to the back fence where the roses grew. Her mother had planted them the spring they arrived, three bushes of pale cream that never bloomed without being watered by hand. Ada dug beside them with the spade she used for fence posts, and the earth came up hard and pale. She wrapped the skull in a feed sack, laid it in the hole with the dreamcatcher tied to one horn, and let the feathers hang down over the bone like fringe on a saddle blanket.

Come August she forgot to check on it. The cream roses opened one petal at a time, their roots having found the shadow of the bone. She cut the first bloom and set it in the sugar tin beside the letter, where the wind could not reach it.